by Cindy Veach
*
I watch three old white men on the news talking about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman to get a bus ticket and travel to another state. It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties with their limp cocks tucked away under the table their small hands gesturing or resting on the table. I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood. And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era abortion law proving that the past does come back to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth. I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right to choose in my 20s only to lose it in my 60s. I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood. In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun. People were brought to tears as they watched in their special protective glasses. People on both sides of the aisle equally moved by the night of day. The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything good and fattens the libidos of men. I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
*
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.
I'm an old white man who couldn't agree more with your perceptive insight.
Thank you! Hemorrhaging rage, no better way to say it.